The word gamut began life as a medieval musical term with Guido d’ Arezzo, who was a musical theorist of the 11th century. He devised the hexachord which was a six-note scale for sight-reading music. Today’s ‘do re mi fa so la …’ come from the system that he derived from the first syllables of certain words in an ancient Latin hymn:

This hymn means ‘absolve the crime of the polluted lip in order that the slaves may be able with relaxed chords to praise with sound your marvellous deeds’. The note below the lowest note (ut) came to be known as the gamma-ut and as time went by, this became gamut or metaphorically, any ‘complete range’. The word music can be traced to the Greek mousike, which is derived from mousa or muse and means ‘of the muses’.

The specialised sense of the word music began in Greek when it came to be used for ‘poetry sung to music’ and, later, for music alone.

Incidentally, in terms of etymology, a museum is a place devoted to the muses coming as it does from the Greek mouseion or ‘place of the muses’. Mosaic also comes from the same source but mouseion in this case became altered to mosaique in French from where English picked it up.

The word carol can be traced to the Greek khoraules, made up of khoros or choir and aulos, or a reed instrument. In classical Latin times, this was the person who accompanied a choir on a flute or reed instrument. Khoraules, earlier used for a dance in a ring accompanied by singing, led on to another version of the word carol, which holds that carol is not a song but a circle of singers.

Comedy also owes its origin to traditions of music. In ancient Greece, a komos was a festival with music and dancing that lasted until after supper and ended with a torchlight parade. Komos or ‘revelry’ was later combined with oidos, meaning singer, to produce komoidos or singer in the revels, creating today’s comedy.